


The Only Voice That Wakes My Ears

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Read My Lips [9]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: AU, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-20
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-27 17:23:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6293215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How John Sheppard went from refusing to talk to being okay with talking to Rodney once in a while; covers high school and college and marriage to Nancy and the first couple of years on Atlantis; from the <a class="i-ljuser-profile" href="http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/profile"><img class="i-ljuser-userhead"/></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/">comment_fic</a> prompt: "Any, any, <i>I've learned to talk with my fingers/The only voice that wakes my ears</i>."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Only Voice That Wakes My Ears

The hardest part about learning sign language was that John could no longer talk with his hands. He'd never been particularly chatty, but he'd always had the dangerous tendency to illustrate his point with his hands, and more than once he'd almost put a friend's eye out. So now that he had to do all his talking with his fingers (not with his voice, never with his voice, because still, now, months later, it was screaming in his ears), he didn't know how to get his point across otherwise. As one of Patrick Sheppard's sons and heirs, he'd always been on the front line to be charming and social at his father's business functions, to shake hands and smile and be in control every second of every day. The other deaf kids at his new fancy sign language school (his tutor suggested he go to an all-deaf school, Patrick Sheppard insisted his son remain at his fancy private boarding school and but attend intense ASL school in the evenings) were all incredibly animated. Their faces gave every emotion away. John learned to read a quirked eyebrow as sarcasm, narrow eyes as fury, hunched shoulders as nervousness. But he was awful at telegraphing his own emotions, and more than once his jokes for the others fell flat. Whenever he tried being as animated as the others, he did it wrong, because they looked offended, like his over-exaggerated facial expressions were a mockery.  
  
He ended up spending a lot of his spare time alone in an unused classroom with a mirror, practicing his facial expressions (he had a non-verbal communication textbook for reference) and making sure he could convey what he wanted to convey at precisely the right moment. His hard work paid off, because the other kids started including him in their conversations, starting smiling and laughing at his jokes. John smiled and grinned and frowned his way through conversations, and he wondered if the other kids were as deliberate as he was, if their facial expressions were just projections and not what they really felt. He knew a lot of them had been deaf all or most of their lives, knew that he, at seventeen, was brand new to their world, had lived in a world they'd never accessed, and some of them were a little jealous, but he learned to respond to the overhead flashing lights like they were doorbells, and he remembered to switch on the closed captioning whenever he turned on the TV in the dorms, and he remembered to move his lips when he signed, but he never, ever spoke.  
  
Some of the other deaf kids who could speak did, for when hearing people were around. John knew that was polite, was proper etiquette, and a Sheppard man was nothing if not the soul of etiquette, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. He wasn't sure what his private tutor had told the school staff or other students, because the one time a girl asked why he didn't speak aloud if he could, the others shut her down.  
  
By the time John was in his sophomore year of college, he'd found a comfortable place in the deaf community surrounding the university, and few people knew that he'd spent the majority of his life as one of the hearing. His interpreter was another student named Evan Lorne, whose older sister was deaf. Evan was a surveying major and an art minor - his mother was an art teacher - but he followed John to all of his math classes and ended up being pretty competent at math himself, just so he could translate the concepts John was learning. John knew his father had hired Evan privately rather than through the student center and that it was Evan's job to make sure John always knew what was going on, when people wanted to talk to him, what they were saying and what mood they were in, but John suspected Evan didn't need to go as above and beyond as he did. Interpreters were supposed to have a strictly professional relationship with those they interpreted for, so apart from Evan's major and minor and the fact of his deaf sister, John knew little about him. But Evan made sure John was aware of any deaf student activities that were happening, like parties and dinners and other get-togethers. Evan also let John know about activities in the wider deaf community, like fundraisers to raise money for local public school so deaf students in mainstream schools had more access to services. There was also a church whose congregation was entirely deaf or members of the wider deaf community, and while John wasn't particularly religious, the chance to socialize was always welcome, and they were all nice Christian people who had potlucks after their meetings, and those nice Christian housewives made the best food. John had been making the rounds at all of the local events for three months before he realized Tally, whose name-sign resembled rainbow with a T, was actually Evan's sister Natalia. Evan's caginess about his personal life was ridiculous.  
  
But John had a good life, a full life, inside the deaf community and out – he was on the university's Mathlete team, part of the local MENSA chapter, and in the chess club – and he knew he had it so much better than others would have in his same situation. He was happy with how things were going. He was careful to convey the right emotion, to keep his lips moving while he signed, and to never speak. He never almost put anyone's eye out anymore, and he was careful not to look too longingly at the guitars in the window of the music shop down the street from his dorm building. Sometimes, when he was alone, just him in his room, he'd talk to himself, lips moving soundlessly, and talk with his hands like he hadn't been able to since he was sixteen, since he'd started learning his new language. He didn't have to worry about conveying the right emotion, wearing the right expression. He could just...be.  
  
And then Tally told John that Evan had a new boyfriend, and John remembered that another thing guys his age did was date. Plenty of the kids in his sign language school through his last two years of high school had dated – mostly each other. One girl, Rose, had gone out with a hearing boy named Thomas. It hadn't lasted long or gone well. But John started trying the dating thing. He knew he was good-looking, that here at Stanford where people didn't automatically recognize the Sheppard name, he could trust their interest in him was something other than political or financial. So he went on dates with a few people, mostly deaf or members of the wider deaf community who were competent enough at sign language that he didn't need Evan playing third wheel.  
  
When Nancy Van Santen approached him after his poli sci class, tapped him on the shoulder and signed hesitantly, he was startled but flattered, pleased. She was pretty and, based on what John had seen of her comments in class, she was smart. Evan was there immediately, interpreting smoothly, and John figured he was a pro, not smirking at the flirty faces Evan was making when he signed for Nancy. John was damn good at reading lips, but he appreciated Evan's thoroughness and precision at his job.  
  
Nancy picked up sign language fast, was better at understanding than the actual signing, and with John's lip-reading skills, Evan was able to avoid third-wheeling fairly early on in the relationship. And again John realized he had to navigate something that had once been second-nature. As a teenager, holding hands with a girl, tracing his fingertip up and down her arm while they watched a movie, a caress before a kiss, those were all wordless communications of affection, of caring, of desire. Now every time he touched Nancy, she turned to face him fully, eyes bright and alert, ready to tackle another bout of conversation in sign language, and John didn't know to tell her he wanted her, what he wanted from her, the way he'd been able to before. Finally, after unintentionally interrupting the movie five times, John decided _screw it_ and leaned in and kissed her. She responded enthusiastically.  
  
It took several months, but eventually John learned to talk to her, learned to understand her in bed when his hands were busy and her mouth was busy and their eyes were closed, and it was good. Good enough that she enrolled in formal, intensive ASL classes, good enough that one day John dragged Evan to the mall and watched Evan and the jewelry store clerks get very flustered as he tried to find the perfect ring.  
  
Dad was pleased when John brought Nancy home for the first time, and John had the sense that for once, Dad wasn't disappointed in him, that the anger and blame he'd been silently harboring against John since he was sixteen had finally lifted. Dave liked Nancy, and she wasn't condescending to him like so many of his girlfriends and dates had been in high school. She was perfect. She was too perfect for him, he didn't deserve her, knew that she was exactly what his father had hoped for him when he gifted her with a share of the Sheppard family diamonds that all Sheppard wives wore, and John knew he couldn't mess this up.  
  
It all fell apart seven months later when John woke in the night screaming so hard he could feel it all through his body even if his ears didn't register a thing (they didn't have to, he could always hear himself screaming). Nancy reached out to try and calm him down and he pulled away from her, scrambled out of the bed and tucked himself into the corner in as small a ball as possible and struggled to breathe. He hadn't dreamed about the car crash in a long time, but he should have known better than to expect a good night's sleep on the anniversary of it. He'd thought about it all day, told himself to take a sleeping pill, but he'd been so caught up in his work on his undergraduate thesis that at the end of the day he'd been exhausted and fallen into bed and –  
  
Nancy stomped hard as she crossed the room to let him know she was approaching. He was still shuddering for breath when she knelt down beside him, patted his shoulder tentatively. He resisted the urge to shrug her hand off, because he was going crazy, he was crawling out of his skin, he could hear the shattering glass and the gunshots and his mother screaming and his own voice underneath it all.  
  
He took several deep breaths, forced his breathing cycle into something more regular. He had control of himself. He could do this. He forced himself to lift his head.  
  
Nancy peered at him, spoke with just her lips. "Are you all right? What happened?"  
  
John lifted his hands. They were shaking, but he didn't care. "Sorry. Nightmare."  
  
"Want to tell me about it?"  
  
He shook his head.  
  
Finally, Nancy lifted her hands and signed, "I didn't realize you had a voice."  
  
Everyone had voices. All deaf people did, unless they also happened to be mute. Some learned to use their voices, some used hearing aids, but most were quiet. If they'd gone deaf young enough, they'd never learned to make sounds reflexively, in fear or surprise, so their laughter was silent and their screams were silent and their orgasms were silent. John knew what she meant.  
  
"I don't use it," he said with his hands.  
  
"Never?"  
  
"Not by choice."  
  
She peered at him. "What does your voice sound like?"  
  
He lifted one shoulder. He had no clue. He remembered what his father and grandfather had sounded like, but his voice hadn't fully broken when he was sixteen.  
  
"Do you ever speak for anyone?"  
  
He shook his head.  
  
"Not even in an emergency?"  
  
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug again.  
  
"Would you ever speak for me?" she asked, just with her hands.  
  
He didn't answer, not with his hands or his mouth or his expression, because the mere notion of it paralyzed him.  
  
And just like that, they were over.  
  
When John first sat down in the Ancient chair at the Antartica outpost, blue lights flared to life, and something clicked in the back of his mind, and for the first time, the ghost-sound that had been plaguing him since he was sixteen faded and died. Whenever he went near Ancient tech, the sounded faded, and John couldn't get enough of it, volunteered to be a human light switch left and right, and then Elizabeth Weir was talking to him, and Evan was interpreting grins and enthusiasm and did John want to travel to another galaxy? At the SGC there had been no question – John Sheppard was never allowed off-world, not even after he'd demonstrated his hand-to-hand and firearm efficiency (carefully trained into him by Evan, who John could employ full time in his own right at this point after solving Navier-Stokes). The chance to go to another galaxy was one he'd never get. He said yes.  
  
And then he met Atlantis, and when she was with him, his mind was blissfully quiet, and he could explore the city, and learn new things, and there was so much to see and do and discover and John wished, fiercely, that he could tell his mother all about it.  
  
The first time he went off-world, he was nervous, because with Atlantis gone he was on his own to face his ghosts again. The team, led by Major Teldy, ran into yet another Ancient logic puzzle, so John set to tackling it, and then Rodney McKay was in his space, insisting that the problem was something beyond petty mathematics, that if John stepped aside Rodney would save all their lives, thanks. He talked so fast John could only catch every third word, and his blue eyes flashed, and Evan's hands were flying, and John could _push_ the voice aside, rise to the challenge.  
  
After they got back from the mission and Beckett fussed over him extra – John was used to the extra fussing by now – John decided he liked Rodney McKay a lot, for more than just the handsome face Rodney had been during his brief stint at the SGC, when John would silently bring him coffee (and go unnoticed half the time), and he wanted to keep solving puzzles with him, so he made sure to smile at Rodney ever chance he got, maybe even flirt a little (and seeing the tiny flash of horror on Evan's face before he went into interpreting!flirt mode was a little too amusing), and two months after John had worked up the nerve to kiss Rodney the first time, he barely realized it when he spoke aloud, "I love you," before he fell asleep in Rodney's arms.


End file.
